Tastemakers with Natalie Walton: How to find your personal style
Teleisha Thomas
August 2026
Natalie Walton is a leading interior stylist, designer and bestselling author with years of experience creating spaces that are deeply personal and built to last. Her practice is rooted in cutting through trends and inspiration overload to help clients focus on what they truly value, and translating that into spaces that master personal style.
Here, Natalie shares how she helps clients uncover their true style and how she designs timeless spaces. Further, we follow Natalie to her favourite design stores to source pieces for clients.
How to find your personal style
The three factors that define your personal style
Where most people go wrong is they confuse decorating styles with their own personal style.
A decorating style is a borrowed aesthetic, tied to a design movement. Something like Scandi modern or modern farmhouse. But your own personal style is actually three separate factors; your story, your values, and your eye. When those three factors come together, that is how you start to know and understand your personal style. If you don’t take time to understand your personal style it's easy to create what you think is appropriate rather than what is meaningful to you, which can lead to costly mistakes.
‘Style’ is your story
Your personal style travels with you. That's why you can live in a city apartment, a country house or by the beach, and your personal style will travel through all those different homes. A decorating style is tied to a design movement. A personal style is tied to a person’s life story.
Understanding your own visual vocabulary creates a foundation and a guide through the unexpected turns that come with creating any home.
Why getting clear on your style matters before anything else
Getting a clear idea of your personal style is the first and most important step. It should come before you start making decisions, sourcing, or spending. Understanding your own visual vocabulary creates a foundation and a guide through the unexpected turns that come with creating any home.
The most common mistake: more inspiration, less clarity
One of the most common challenges people find themselves in, is a space that just doesn't feel like it's coming together. They've gathered references from Pinterest or from the internet without filtering through their own eye, values, and experience of the space. More inspiration rarely creates more clarity. What it creates is noise. The real work is in filtering inspirational images and making it something your own.
Walton, N. (2022). STYLE: The art of creating a beautiful home. Photography Lynden Foss
